Write Skew

Thanks to the tireless work of Google Summer of Code student Shubham Barai with the support of reviewers, a mentor and a committer, PostgreSQL 11 will ship with predicate lock support for  hash indexes ,  gin indexes  and  gist indexes .  These will make SERIALIZABLE transaction isolation much more efficient with those indexes, filling in some of the feature combination gaps and quirks that exist in my favourite RDBMS. It seems like a good time to write a bit about SERIALIZABLE and how it interacts with other selected PostgreSQL features, including indexes. A bit of background If you want to read something a little less dry than the usual papers about transaction isolation, I recommend  ACIDRain: Concurrency-Related Attacks on Database-Backed Web Applications  which, among other things, discusses a transaction isolation-based attack that bankrupted a bitcoin exchange.  It also makes some interesting observations about some of PostgreSQL's r...